My main concessions to lockdown have been to take my cameras for a walk once a day rather than twice, and go hunting for food once a week. I have more time to sit at the computer but spend much of it trying to understand the extraordinary event we are all experiencing. Living history is rather more exciting than raking over the past, and Filey genealogy is a casualty of the Virus War.

I still have an appetite for family history though, and given that my number may be called soon it seems more appropriate to pick up the threads of my own people.

When I fled Cold Comfort Cottage twelve years ago I brought a few sticks of furniture to Filey, including two bookcases. One was my father’s, the other mine. Both began their working lives in my childhood home – and both had been well made by Lorry. I know, he was probably Laurie. He wasn’t a blood relative but was married to Phyllis. They visited us maybe once a year, were quiet and pleasant. My rudimentary Roots Magic database tells me that Phyllis is a first cousin once removed. Our common ancestors are my great grandparents  Henry LOCKETT and Mary Ann MORGAN.

Mary Ann is almost alone amongst my forebears in having an air of romance and mystery. In one source she claims to have been born in France, in another the Channel Islands. Sort of romantic. The mystery is enshrined in a hand-me-down story that her father saved a number of people from a wrecked ship, rowing out in his small boat like a male Grace Darling and being rewarded with a memorial somewhere on Guernsey. Or maybe Jersey. I don’t know his first name. It may not be a true story.

Phyllis was the only daughter of Elizabeth Ann LOCKETT and William Henry Phillip SMAWFIELD. I remember my dad telling tales about his Aunt Lizzie Smawfield. She was a character though I don’t recall ever meeting her. (I was eight-years-old when she died.) She was William Smawfield’s second wife. The first was the Elizabeth of Picturesque Terrace who married at eighteen, bore a daughter that died almost immediately, and then slipped away herself the following year. There is a photograph of Picturesque Terrace online but it isn’t the “seriously ironic” place she called home. Astonishingly, Hull had two Picturesque Terraces. Elizabeth’s was in Manchester Street and no longer exists – having been obliterated by hideous modern warehouses and engineering sheds.

Find Elizabeth on the Shared Tree.

Bird 77 · Tufted Duck

Observing social distance. This morning there was just one male Tufty on the lake, looking rather apprehensive in the middle of a gang of mallard drakes.

I shared Filey Sands today with one man, his dog and a seal. Until I can walk long distances again, and freely, I’ll incorporate Today’s Images in “standard” posts.